External hard drives.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Atom Bomb
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Atom Bomb

Atom Bomb

Wtf is a PRS
I have just got an External HP 500GB hard drive.

Would i benefit from this unit while recording? Like if i told my DAW to record to that rather then my main drive that is running my OS? Or would my CPU have a stoke trying figure everything out?

In my mind it makes sense, but then again my mind is a terrible place to be?
 
Is it USB or FireWire? How many tracks are you recording at once?

I use external FireWire drives for recording all the time and have never had a problem. In fact, it's better to record to a drive other than your C drive.
 
MadAudio said:
I use external FireWire drives for recording all the time and have never had a problem. In fact, it's better to record to a drive other than your C drive.
Click to expand...


Totally agree here!...Ever since employing an external usb (Free-agent) hard-drive, many of my 'jumpy' recording issues dissapeared!...
External USB drive???..go figure!!
I record upto 10 tracks (drumkit into AA1.5) at once, no issues.
My internal sata system seems to suck.
 
that's awesome. Glad to hear that it wasn't my imagination. It is USB. My laptop does have a firewire port but the harddrive only came with USB. Bummer.

I'm only going to be recording one track at a time. ITs just me now. Now more band. So I'm going it alone.

Im hoping it will fix the latency issue.

I also found MusicXP.net which has alot of tweaks i am going to try as well.

Has any one else switched their CPU to background services from programs? Does that make a huge difference?
 
Test it. I've done 22 tracks of 48/24 on usb no problem. This is on a drive with a 16 meg cache though. A lot of the 2 meggers or worse might have some problems
 
wow. I plan on it.

What cache is 16mg? Like The virtual memory?
 
Hmm. I checked the spec book and it says it has a data transfer rate of 480Mbs/sec on a usb 2.0 connection?

That is not the same deal as the cache is it? Cant Be? I'll Keep looking
 
no, it should say if it has an 8 meg cache...if it doesnt say anything its probably a 2 meg cache

You might be able to get some specs from the info you get from here: http://www.hdtune.com/

Best thing to do is just test and see though, it could very easily works
 
Since it is a newer drive, I would suspect that it has an 8 meg cache (also factoring its size).
 
Atom Bomb said:
Hmm. I checked the spec book and it says it has a data transfer rate of 480Mbs/sec on a usb 2.0 connection?

That is not the same deal as the cache is it? Cant Be? I'll Keep looking
Click to expand...

this refers to the HD's potential 'data transfer rate/speed', when connected to a USB2.0 connector......

HD Cache is a small 'buffer' memory that resides in the HD, for the HD.
Almost like having a nice big capacitor on a power-supply.;)
 
Awesome. thanks guys. Its raining here today so im going to be spending some time on this. I'll Be back later with the good word.
 
When buying a drive for recording or audio playback it's bet to use firewire in my opinion. There are a lot of drives that come in enclosures that have double or triple interfaces, i.e. firewire 800, 400, and USB. Those are the best to have because you can use them in a lot of different circumstances.
 
SonicAlbert said:
When buying a drive for recording or audio playback it's bet to use firewire in my opinion. There are a lot of drives that come in enclosures that have double or triple interfaces, i.e. firewire 800, 400, and USB. Those are the best to have because you can use them in a lot of different circumstances.
Click to expand...

I saw an ad for a caddy product that did all three, but I cant remember where. Do you know what Im talking about? I'd LOVE to have one
 
Atom Bomb said:
wow. I plan on it.

What cache is 16mg? Like The virtual memory?
Click to expand...

Cache is what hard drives use to locate the physical sectors a file is located on. To put it simply, the drive stores file locations in memory (cache) the 1st time a file is retrieved. Then the next time a process asks for that file, it doesn't need to scan a FAT table, superblocks, or whatever your filesystem uses, it immediately knows the location and skips the lookup. Looking up a file location would take nanoseconds or microseconds with cache, and milliseconds without. Those milliseconds add up fast!
 
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